Over recent decades, the field of mobile robot path planning has evolved significantly, driven by the pursuit of enhanced navigation solutions. The need to determine optimal trajectories within complex environments has led to the exploration of diverse path planning methodologies. This paper focuses on a specific subset: Bio-inspired Population-based Optimization (BPO) methodologies. BPO methods play a pivotal role in generating efficient paths for path planning. Amidst the abundance of optimization approaches over the past decade, only a fraction of studies has effectively integrated these methods into path planning strategies. This paper’s focus is on the years 2014-2023, reviewing BPO techniques applied to mobile robot path planning challenges. Contributions include a comprehensive review of recent BPO methods in mobile robot path planning, along with an experimental methodology to compare them under consistent conditions. This encompasses the same environment, initial conditions, and replicates. A multi-objective function is incorporated to evaluate optimization methods. The paper delves into key concepts, mathematical models, and algorithm implementations of examined optimization techniques. The experimental setup, methodology, and benchmarking performance results are discussed. Based on the proposed experimental methodology, Improved Sparrow Search Algorithm (ISpSA) shows the best cost improvement percentage (7.87%), but suffers in terms of optimization time. On the other hand, Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) has lesser improvement percentage of 6.05% but better optimization time. In conclusion, the standardized approach for benchmarking BPO algorithms provides useful insights into their strengths and challenges in mobile robot path planning.